Right turn at a broken traffic light: Germany’s AfD

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Millions of people left cities Syria during the Assad years. Now the regime has been toppled. What's it like for those who are returning? Our correspondent meets two refugees who've finally been reunited with their families.

And cinema history may never again know a director so different from his films. Our Obituary's editor explores the life of David lynch, whose cheery, gentle ways belied a mind constantly thinking about what darkness lies beneath the normal. First up though, In exactly a month, Germans will vote in a federal election. Late last year, the Chancellor Olaf Scholz called a vote of no confidence in his endlessly squabbling coalition government a vote he knew he would lose. Bad news for him. His center left Social Democrat party is now a distant third in the polls. But it's good news for the party in second place, once confined to the fringes of German politics and now very much on the up.

So I spent a few days last week in Saxony, a state in eastern Germany, which is pretty much the heartland of the alternative for Germany, the AfD hard right party.

Tom Nuttall is our Berlin bureau chief.

I spoke to MPs, officials, supporters. I also spoke to the party's co leader, Tino Cupola. And essentially what I found is a party that is heading into this election with a lot of confidence, with some swagger even.

And what is that swagger based on?

Essentially it's based on the fact that the AfD is doing rather well. About a year ago, its support peaked at around 23 24% of the electorate. It fell back somewhat during the course of 2024, but towards the end of the year it started to grow again. So they seem to be perfectly timing their electoral performance so far. Anyway, there's still a month to go and that's reflected in the confidence of the people in the party that you speak to. And another reason for the party's confidence is the unexpected endorsement of Elon Musk, who has inserted himself brazenly into German politics and conducted a live conversation on X with Alice Weidel, its candidate for the Chancellorship.

Everyone can choose to cross our border.

To immigrate into our Social Security system.

And cannot be deported afterwards because they.

Threw away their passports.

I mean, like, how insane is that?

Well, it is very insane, but that's.

Exactly what's happened in the us. There's a sort of.

Although to outsiders this stuff looks strange. Elon Musk clearly knows nothing about German politics. The conversation with Alice Vidal was bizarre, rambling byways into colonization of Mars and whether Hitler was a communist. Talk to people in the party and they're thrilled by this. They think it helps contribute to their kind of normalization, that it will help them reach voters that they may previously have struggled with, including younger voters or business groups. Whether it is actually borne out in the polls remains to be seen, but certainly the feeling inside the party that this is very good news for them.

So where do you think this change in fortunes is coming from?

Well, first of all, look at the party itself. It's more disciplined and united than it has been in the past, when divisions between, you might say, more extreme and somewhat less extreme factions inside the party have been on full display. This time, there's much more message discipline. So, for example, positions like whether or not Germany should leave the Eurozone or leave, leave the eu, which many people inside the party would like to do, they have been put in the background somewhat. The party now plays up concerns over immigration, top of the list. Also inflation, energy prices, foreign policy, Germany starts on the war in Ukraine. To a certain extent, these are much more prominent in the AfD's messaging, and these tap into the concerns of some Germans much more effectively than some of these niche messages would do.

Do you think the swagger has anything to do with moderating the message somewhat? As we've seen elsewhere, the National Rally in France, for example. No.

And in fact, this is the interesting thing, quite the opposite. As the years rolled by relatively moderate members leaders have been expunged, the party's positions have become increasingly radical. At the same time, it has become more and more popular. This really sets aside the AFD from most of its European counterparts. And when I asked Tino Cupala, the party's co leader, whether he agrees that the party has become more radical, his answer was interesting. Rather than deny it, he essentially acknowledged the point, but said that politics in Germany has become increasingly extreme.

The inner Gewen is extreme, the inner Sicherheit is extreme.

Energy prices have become more extreme, he said internal security has become more extreme. And here he referenced. You may remember this attack on Christmas market in Magdeburg a little bit before the Christmas holidays, which led to the death of six people, which the AFD has capitalized on. So the party does not deny that its message has become more radical. It simply thinks that the problems that are assailing Germany, in its view, have become more extreme, and therefore more extreme solutions are required.

It seems the electorate is more comfortable with that extreme message. I mean, how do you explain that part of things?

Yeah, I mean, some of them, and this is a really important point, there are large parts of the electorate, a big majority, that are horrified by the growth of the AfD, and many of them vote accordingly. But certainly, yes, a growing number of people are open to the AfD's message. That's what we clearly see in the opinion polls. Of course, there are many problems in Germany. The economy is flatlining. Energy prices are very high. The illegal immigration number numbers have been very high in recent years. Just 22% of Germans told a survey last year that they thought that Germany was up to the challenges of the future. And it's essentially that fear, that anger, that the AFD is tapping into very successfully. Endless stunts and scandals keep attention on the party. One branch recently distributed election flyers in the form of fake plane tickets pledging to deport illegal immigrants. This is a stunt that has an antecedent in the Nazi era. The party become so controversial and so radical that next week the Bundestag is actually going to debate the possibility of banning them entirely. I think it's highly unlikely that this would happen, and it certainly won't happen in time for the election. But it will still be an important moment. It shows you just how far the party has placed itself outside the mainstream. The AFD itself might actually be delighted to have this because it feeds their narrative that they are a genuine alternative and that other parties will not listen to their message and that their only answer is to use the power of the law to keep them outside of electoral politics.

And about that election in a month, if the party is sort of in the ascendancy, has a broader base, how do you see that playing out at the ballot box?

Yeah, so this is a crucial difference between Germany and many other European countries. The AFD is hoping to retain its current polling score of about 20% next month. That would be its best ever election performance. It would see Its representation in Parliament roughly double from where it is today. But unlike many other European countries where AFD like parties have been in the ascendancy in recent years, the AFD is going to remain locked out of power. And the reason for that is that every other mainstream party, and crucially the center right conservative Christian Democrats, have said that they will not work with the AfD. They are retaining what is called in Germany a Brand Mauer or a firewall around the AfD. Friedrich Mats, the head of the CDU who is likely to be the next Chancellor, has said that to work with the AFD would be to sell the CDU's soul. He's very, very clear on this. So there is no prospect of the AFD entering government at the federal level and also, by the way, any of Germany's states anytime soon. If you look at the results of the elections in the east, despite the AFD doing very well over 35% in some cases, every other party came together to block them from power. And that shows you the strength of the anti AFD firewall that exists in the CDU and the other German parties.

Do you think that firewall is robust?

It's robust for now. Talk to the AfD, of course. And they think it's just a matter of time. They point to Austria, where an AFD like party, the Freedom Party, is now on the cusp not only of entering government, which it's done before, but of leading that government because the center right Conservative Party has agreed need to prop it up. There is a concern amongst the mainstream parties that if Germany's next government is unable to restore a sense of confidence amongst voters on the economy, on migration, on foreign policy, on all of these issues, that the next election in 2029, the AfD might perform better than ever and that at that point the Brand Mauer might start to crumble. That is where the concern is now for four years time in 2029.

Tom, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

I remember when they entered Aleppo, we were like, it was shock for us, but we didn't know what this is.

Dua Mohammed, 13 years ago, she fled the Assad regime in Syria.

Then they started about liberation, like a liberation operation, like to liberate Syria from Assad.

You know, Gareth Brown writes about Syria.

Why don't you tell me where you were six weeks ago? What was your life six weeks ago?

I was a graduate from Manchester University.

This is Dua's husband, Jamal Ismail.

I was building my new life in London. I was checking where I will live in London and what kind of work I want to do.

Jamal is a documentary filmmaker. He worked in Syria in the early days of the uprising against Assad, but his work meant he had to leave his now wife, Dua is a feminist activist. Since they fled Syria 13 years ago, they've been in Jordan, Turkey, London. Just six weeks ago, they were in Manchester. When that long off dream of returning to Syria became a possibility and then a reality, my life turned from.

Establishing my life in London to be establishing my life in Damascus.

So, Gareth, you've been spending quite a bit of time traveling around Syria since Assad was toppled. Have you met many returning refugees like Dua and Jamal?

I've met some. Not a huge amount. I think Dua and Jamal were the first ones I'd really spent a significant amount of time with. I actually met Dua at a conference in Damascus, and a few days later, she was driving to Masyaf, a town in northern Syria where her husband is from. So I was heading north myself. I offered her and her sister a lift. We went to Masyaf. I met her husband, her husband's family, and spent the afternoon right in the heart of Syria. Am I the first tourist to Masyaf since the regime fell? Masyaf is an interesting place because under the Assad regime, it was a real hotspot for the Hezbollah and Iranian presence in Syria. So a very militarily significant town under the Assad regime.

Okay.

Masyaf is mixed religiously, politically, culturally. Small city built 2,000 years ago by Roman. Then it became an Islamic city around a thousand hundred bc.

The two had met as refugees outside of Syria. And it was only a few weeks ago, as Assad was toppled, that she was able to visit his hometown and meet his family. They are just two of perhaps more than 6 million Syrians who had fled the country after more than a decade of conflict.

Gareth, It's a huge contrast between Britain and Syria. And of course, in Syria, there's so much rebuilding ahead and so much uncertainty about the future. Do you have a sense of how they're finding that transition and whether they're planning to stay?

It is a different life. Absolutely. These are two people who were planning a future outside of Syria, but I really got the sense from both of them that they felt they were back where they belong.

When we moved to the uk, we were sometime just spending the night watching some videos on. On YouTube and talking about, like, are we going to be able to come back on the future one day and I will see his city and meet his People, and he gonna meet my people. You know, it was for us a dream and nothing will be happening. It was the impossible.

I think they returned out of a national duty, a duty to help rebuild Syria. And just because they weren't in the country for the last 10 years doesn't mean they weren't very committed to it. And, you know, being a refugee in recent years, whether in Turkey or in Europe, has been a difficult existence for many people. In some cases, it's not a particularly dignified existence. Cemal was studying at the University of Manchester, where he received a very prestigious scholarship. They found safety and stability in Britain.

I was thinking that the past two weeks before Assad fallen, it was for us just focusing about our future in the uk, what we gonna do, what our career will be. For me, I was doing my work online, which was focusing more on Syria.

Despite all that, you know, in just a few days, as it looked like the regime was going to fall, they made a decision to return to Syria at the first available opportunity.

As you say, There are over 6 million Syrians outside the country. How many of them will follow Jamal and Dua back, do you think?

It's very difficult to say, but I think indications are that many will. Syria's new de facto leader, Ahmed Sharrar, previously known as Abu Mohammed Al Jelani, has said that he believes if sanctions are lifted, then millions of Syrians will return. And from my own experience reporting on Syrian refugee communities across Europe, in Turkey over the last decade, I think many will want to come back and play a role in rebuilding the country, just like Dua and Jamal. It's a national duty.

I think at least half of them will come back, especially the elderly or small families. Okay. But it depends on their own situations because I think half of the country are destroyed by Assad's army. So for me, it's easier because I can't come back to my house.

I was really struck listening to their story of coming back. It sounded as abrupt as their departure from Syria. You know, over 10 years ago, they were forced to leave the country very quickly, very abruptly. And here they were once again, almost in the blink of an eye, making a decision to drop everything and return.

And how do they feel about the future?

I think like many Syrians, they're optimistic.

For me, the biggest concern is Gan, which is Assad existence.

They are enjoying this freedom, breathing relief, enjoying the freedom of speech, enjoying this new exchange of ideas which is taking place not just in Syria, but in Syrian communities across the world.

We can, as Syrian, build the Next period to be safe for us, for all women, for all people, all Syrians without detention centers, without bombing, without chemical.

Weapons, Philippines, you know, I think they have a particular vision of what they hope Syria will be like.

The challenge is political in Syria. The challenge about the. The face of Syria is it will. Will it be Islamic, will it be secular? It's a challenge. Not for us, as, for example, leftist people or secular people. It's a challenge for the Islamists who control the rule.

I was struck listening to them. They probably have some differences in vision to Ahmed, Charr and hts, but it was clear to me that they want to be part of this debate. They want to engage with it, and they're willing to make sacrifices. They've left behind relatively comfortable lives in the uk. Let's not forget that to be under.

Siege, for example, they used to get in or to live in.

I took a walk around Masyaf with Jamal Dua and Jamal's father, and it was clear to me that despite having been in the relative safety of Britain, being home meant an awful lot to them and they were awfully proud of where they came from. You said Masyaf is the center of the world?

Yes. The center of the world, yes.

Is this true?

Gareth, thank you so much. Really interesting to talk to you, as always.

Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The first long, proper kiss David lynch had with a girl was in a ponderosa pine forest in northwestern America.

Ann Roe is the Economist's obituaries editor.

They were lying on a carpet of pine needles that was about 2 foot thick. The high trees reached up to blue sky. He loved the forest. He himself found great comfort and beauty in the trees, loved walking among them. When it came to the television series that made him wildly popular, that series was full of the sense of the Northwest, the trees, the mist and so on. In fact, if you looked at the opening sequence of the series, it showed the mountains, the trees and the mist rolling in to the accompaniment of wonderful bass notes on the synthesizer. The whole driver of the story was the murder of a high school homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, whose body was found washed up and wrapped in plastic. As the story unfolded, it became clear that for all the surface ordinariness of Twin Peaks, the town, there was a lot of violent strangeness going on underneath. He supposed this was true of all small towns. He'd been brought up in them, mostly in Boise, Idaho. He had a romantic feeling about them. The white picket fences. Don't know what the Sunday excursions, the scrubbed children, the gardens and the roses, on the other hand. He found that he was haunted and worried by them. He felt that underneath those prim lawns there were insects devouring each other. That everything new that appeared was hastening to decay. Entropy was always increasing in these towns. And at night. He was very fond of night. He liked to go walking around the street and he would look at the houses. Not the brightly lit ones, but the ones where the lights were just a bit dim and the curtains were drawn. He loved curtains because you never knew what secrets might be hiding behind them. He could picture a man and a woman sitting there in silence, the sort of coiled menace between them. And if he entered that atmosphere, what would he do? What was going to happen next in this tale? Should he say something? Would they say something? His view of what was ugly or grotesque was not like other people's. He had a fascination with textures, mud, slime. He could look at sores or wounds and think they were beautiful. As a young man, he'd wanted to live the art life. And what really seized him when he went to art college in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, was the state of the town. It was very run down in those days and it was full of abandoned factories. He fell in love with these factories. Their broken windows, the stark walls, the crumbling atmosphere of the whole place. And the ceaseless wailing of the trains. And all this sooty, smoky ruination fed through into film he made in 1977, the first one that really got him noticed, which was called Eraserhead. Eraserhead was the story of a man called Henry Spencer, who sported a hairstyle, looked rather like a tombstone on top of his head, who always had a look of wonderment and horror. And in fact, it seemed to be the tale of a new father who had a baby. In his case, a mutant baby, sort of fetus looking thing, which he simply couldn't cope with. So Henry wandered through the world in a state of confusion, wondering how on earth things could be the way they were. All his films were instances of people trying to come to confront the dark forces within themselves. The odd thing was that he himself didn't seem to have a dark side. He dressed like someone out of the 1950s. He had 1950s turns of phrase, like calling other men buster or saying that something was peachy keen when he meant it was fine. The only thing that ruffled his serene composure was when he lost control of the work. In the end, he ran up against the TV companies with Twin Peaks. Abc, which was producing it, thought it was going much too slowly. So ABC said he had to reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was. And the revelation took place under the haunting tones of the World Spins by Julie Cruz. So that was the end of that, it seemed. But David lynch found he couldn't leave Laura Palmer alone. He suspected he'd fallen in love with her, and he wasn't quite sure why. But he made a prequel to the series, and he also, in 2017, put out a third series, which was much more of a success. And it gave him a chance to get back into the forests again, where he could wander through and bravely confront the darker sides of them, while also reflecting what a strange and beautiful trip life actually was.

Anne Rowe on David lynch, who's died aged 78. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.